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In what has to be the ultimate PR coup,
SodaStream, the publicly-traded maker of
home-carbonation machines, has managed to get millions of
people to watch its Super Bowl
ad before it airs on Fox this Sunday.

For the second year in a row, the “make your own soda” upstart's
Super Bowl commercial has been rejected for going after industry
kings Coke and Pepsi (both major sponsors of the game).

While last year’s banned commercial was a tad aggressive, this year’s ad --
which features a seductive Scarlett Johansson touting the
company’s home-carbonation machine -- is far tamer. At the end
of the spot, Johansson offers the weak diss (if you can even
call it that) “Sorry, Coke and Pepsi.”

Diss or no diss, it was enough for Fox to pull the plug, forcing
SodaStream to hastily edit the commercial at the last minute.

While top executives at SodaStream have made a show of acting
flummoxed at the network’s ruling -- chief marketing officer Ilan
Nacasch told Yahoo he was “very surprised” about Fox’s decision,
while CEO Daniel Birnbaum told USA Today that Fox was “afraid of Coke and Pepsi” --
it’s hard to believe that they weren’t planning for this to
happen. Or possibly even wishing for it.

After all, a year ago, Birnbaum told Entrepreneur: "It
is a PR gift
to have an ad banned.” At the time, he was speaking about
a commercial that had been banned in the
U.K., which showed cans, bottles and cases of conventional
sodas exploding every time a consumer carbonated a drink with
one of SodaStream's machines. Birnbaum was abuzz with all the
free press bubbling in: "We got so much media coverage from
that,” he said.

Yaron Kopel, SodaStream’s chief innovation and design officer,
insists that the company wasn’t expecting Fox to reject its
commercial. “It simply mentions the brands in a humorous way! If
we wanted to make sure we were banned, we would have done
something more provocative.” That said, he admits that the ban is
not an altogether bad development. “It’s kind of another gift."

“The response is amazing,” Kopel says. “The original ad has been
shown on broadcast television, on all the major networks, on Good
Morning America -- I’d say it’s already reached millions of
people.” And that’s before the edited version of the ad airs Sunday
night.

This isn’t the first time the company has used unconventional
methods to get its message across. Around four years ago,
SodaStream set-up art installations in cities around the
world featuring cages full of soda bottles and cans
retrieved from nearby landfills, which were meant to dramatize
the soda bottle waste an average family produces in a year.

When you’re a small fish competing against industry sharks, you
have to innovate. “Our entire marketing budget for the year is
probably equal to Coke’s advertising budget for a single day,”
Kopel says. “We need to be a bit more creative about telling our
story.”